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old hand
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how can we misinterpret the intention of that mother bird? As long as the bird can't tell us her intention, I prefer to speak of instictive behavior. There is too high a risk of anthropomorphism otherwise. To me, this has nothing to do with value judgment.
I do not refute either of the definitions you quote. They are beautiful as such. The problems start when you try to apply them to concrete cases. Let's take person A, who donates $1000 to a charity. Person B, who likes A, considers this really altruistic, while C, who has a grudge against A, suspects that A has acted out of guilt from some earlier misdeed... You might object that A could have donated anonymously. But then the question of judging his/her altruism would never arise..
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Capfka, Wsieber, et al...
This debate is stemming from a confusion between two celar kinds of altruism - Behavioural altruism and Psychological alrtuism.
The latter is studied to death only in humans; Jackie's question was specifically referring to this kind. She mentioned persons in her question. It is only with humans that you can study the psychology of motives and whether altruism is subjective or not... Is someone 'really, genuinely' selfless or is there a subliminal underlying motive?
With animals, the effort is to study the biololgy of altruism. The behavioural consequences. As in, what is the 'effect' of an altruistic action on an individual and on the herd.
It is because we, in our language, ascribe all sorts of sentiments to words such as altruism, selfishness, selflessness, that we get upset when the poor (much derided in these columns!) biologists, use similar words to explain behaviour. Let us take the case of a mother bird who tries to distract a predator from its young, by attracting attention to herself. All we can see is the behaviour of the bird and the effect. Not the intent. Did the baby birds survive as a result? Are all the birds of her flock indulging in the same behaviour and are the little birds being saved? Nobody is trying to assess the intent of the birds, though tremendous strides have been made in animal cognition studies. If the babies survive, the mother bird has hit upon a successful strategy. It is a successul propagation strategy and will not be flushed down the gene drain.
Evolution is built around survival and not any old survival either. It chooses wilfully, the best, the brightest, the fittest. And that is why the hapless biologist is trying so hard to see, what it is that the brightest has that gives it its favoured status. And invariably, it is a stronger survival strategy.
Altruism in biological terms is helping another at expense to oneself. Practically, if every life form did this, and behaved according to this underlying principle, then everybody will remove themselves from the gene pool, wouldn't they? And so, altruism is not a successful survival strategy and is not favoured by evolution. The biologist is only trying to interpret the continued survival of birds, insects, humans and others as a vote against altruism.
We have to TEACH our children to be good, kind, helpful, polite, etc., don't we? It isn't the other way around.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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I have to agree with you to some extent, Maahey, but the behaviour of a mother bird in trying to distract a predator from her nest can be easily explained as instinct. The motive the sociobiologists would ascribe (and they may be correct for all I know) is that she is ensuring that her genes are passed on to posterity. In other words, protecting the nest and fledglings is part of the drive to survive for you and your offspring to the betterment of the entire species. If you don't try to protect them then you are a "weak link" in the species and you and your line "deserve" to fail. Simplistic Darwinism, perhaps? Dunno.
We know that such behaviour has to be instinctive because it seems virtually impossible that a mother bird could pass such things on to her young conceptually unless the situation occurred often enough for the action to be imprinted on the young birds' brains. In that case, logic tells us that only young birds which came from a nest which had been attacked and defended successfully more than once would be likely to survive to pass their genes on except by the merest happenstance.
None of which has any explanatory power in terms of a cat trying to feed a dead dog.
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But..but..Capf, where is the disagreement? It is a survival instinct that is hardwired into the DNA. The biologists ask: WHY do we survive? Not because of altruism, is the conclusion. Altruism is not favoured by evolution; it is at the expense of the self; can be detrimental to self interest and therefore is not selected.
To my mind, none (except for the bees) of the utterly charming anecdotes posted above have anything to do with altruism. It might have to do with emotions and feelings of love, caring, nurturing same as we have. Not survival. The biology of altruism is connected almost exclusively with survival and propagation of the species.
As for the bees that sting honey raiders and in the process die themselves.... one striking aspect of almost all such warrior insects is that they are sterile!! No problems therefore with propagation or having to survive to propagate.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Not because of altruism, is the conclusion. Altruism is not favoured by evolution; it is at the expense of the self; can be detrimental to self interest and therefore is not selected.
A) I see no reason to assume that altruistic actions cannot be instinctive, so saying that something is instinctive is not, to me, a defeater of the notion that it is altruistic.
2) Altruistic actions can be beneficial to the gene pool. If one's actions contribute to the survival of one's children or even of one's siblings or one's siblings' children they can contribute to the survival of one's genome.
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I think "survival" in evolutionary terms doesn't mean what we think it means in everyday terms. I think "survival" means living long enough and in a manner to pass on your genes. I'm thinking of, say, the sickle cell mutation. This is beneficial to the host to the extent that it will allow the host to live long enough to breed (despite having malaria), although it will eventually kill the host.
Evolution doesn't work to make anyone comfortable or give them the longest possible life. It works to make them have the greatest chance of passing on their genetic material.
I'm not sure whether altruism is a good choice of words to describe, for example, what honey bees do for their queens and for their hives. Despite the intent, it does have the anthropomorpic overtone. But despite that it might make for confusion, the term is in wide use and I don't know that it's worth the effort to fight the tide on this one.
Sometimes, it's not clear what is genetic and what is not genetic - even what it means to have a "genetic predisposition." I saw a TV program some years ago about birds. They all looked alike to me, but they represented different species of "something." Interesting observation. These different species which looked pretty much all alike to my untrained eye (though it's likely the experts could tell the difference), these species all have different songs. They did some very simple experiments to understand whether the songs were genetic or learned. They took some eggs of one species and moved them to another species. What they observed:
1. The birds who were moved did not spontaneously learn the songs from their species - so the song wasn't hereditary.
2. The birds who were moved could not learn the songs of the species they were born into (their adopted species) - so the song wasn't learned.
Well what was it then? It was just a little more complicated. While the song was not completely hereditary or completely learned, it was clear to the researches that both of these played an important role. The birds obviously had a "genetic predisposition" for a particular song, but wouldn't learn that song unless exposed to it.
(I'm vague on this - as I said it was a few years ago that I saw the program - but I seem to recall that not only did the moved birds not learn their own species' song, but they COULD NEVER learn the song if they were later moved to be with their own species.)
Honey bee behavior is almost certainly purely hereditary. This particular bird behavior seems clearly a mix of the two. But human behavior - I think this is what the crux of the argument between sociobiologists and their opponents. I don't think they (the SBs) would assert that our behavior is determined, so much as limited in some way - that people, while malleable, are not perfectly malleable.
An example is the human conception is beauty. Ever since Meade and probably before we have believed that anything goes with respect to beauty, that it's utterly in the eye of the beholder, that it's almost completely determined by culture. But some people believe they have found threads of commonality between these superficially very different conceptions of beauty. Furthermore, they've done tests that "measure" people's subjective reaction to beauty, and discovered that the results aren't completely determined by culture, that our conceptions of beauty is not entirely dependent on culture. Of course this assumes that their methodology is good and their conclusions correct.
I don't know what the bottom line is with these things, let alone how it will turn out. I do think some of the results are suspicious (and I'm really big on results making sense and I'm not going to bend over just because some know-it-all in a lab coat tells me my reality isn't real), but I reiterate that from what I've seen of this kind of work it doesn't seem any more untrustworthy than sociology or psychology. That's not a great recommendation, of course, and I don't mean it to be.
k
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Ken, this is the argument, precisely. The SBs would argue that despite the experiment, it's all in the genes dontcha know? They reject nurture as being a key to species surival and betterment. Susan Oyama from NYC ws a fellow at Otago when I was there, and she was a Stephen Jay Gould agreer (rather than disciple). She had literally dozens of SB papers in which analysis of the results ran along the lines of if A then B. And, intuitively, therefore, C as well. And the next one would quote the first paper's C conclusion as gospel and they all went on their merry way. We were set a task to find psychology foraging theory papers using the same approach towards proof. I think that between the class of 20 or so of us, we found one that was slightly suspect. It was certainly a good way to get us to read a ridiculous number of monumentally boring papers, that's for sure.
I don't know whether nature overpowers nurture, but I suspect, with no proof, that the higher up the food chain a creature is, the more impact that nurture will have on its personal survival and, by derivation, its potential to contribute to the gene pool. Therefore, you are probably quite right when you say that honey bee behaviour is almost certainly genetically programmed - although you could probably also argue a case that some of the "dance steps" that they use to describe a nectar find are learned from their peers. Dunno, and don't really care all that much! But you could equally argue that if a human tried to survive on instinct alone and what it could discover for itself, it would soon be a very dead human.
I find all animal "altruism" suspect. Even when you see cooperation among animals - witness the cute little meerkat lookout system and the "uncle" and "aunt" childminding services - I'm pretty sure I'm looking at something to which the animals are genetically predisposed. The actual task may be learned from parents and peers, but the drive to do it is "instinctive". The same argument applies to dogs minding children.
Rationalise it how you will, if you have lived with animals (and I suppose we all have), you see a mixture of things instinctive - the reason, for instance, that we can housetrain dogs and cats is that their mothers teach them not to foul their own nests in the wild. All you are doing is defining the nest boundary. But you wouldn't even be able to do that if the animal didn't have the drive to do it anyway - and things learned. But there are limits to what they will easily learn. Try teaching a dog not to dump on the lawn. I know you can't; I've tried with all of my dogs and never, ever succeeded. Why? Well, the animal psychs tell us that it is a matter of what is underfoot (sorry, that's substrate in dog-shrink speak). Dogs seem to prefer grass - ordirt or gravel - over asphalt if they can find it. I know how upset my dogs always are/were when they had to dump or even piddle on the footpath. They'd hunt around for as long as they could hold on to avoid doing that.
My query about the cat feeding the dead dog wasn't intended to be a "cutesy" anecdote. It actually happened, and it has bugged me ever since, because it runs completely counter to what I believe I know about animal behaviour (not that I think I'm an expert). Of course, we have anthromorphised it to some extent - the two animals were firm friends - but cats simply do not do that kind of thing. It shouldn't even occur to them. SO WHY?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Another anecdotal story - When I lived in a condo Betty, a lady who lived two units from me, had a male cat. Betty adopted the cat after the cat had spent time, abandonded, in the wild. She named him Precious. One day a sickly, scared young female cat crawled into Betty's small garden at the front of her unit. Betty tried to entice the female into the house but had to abandon efforts because the female tried, weakly, to run away. She put out milk and a small blanket for the kitty and kept watch on her. Precious meanwhile, caught small animals to feed her. Eventually the wee one gained enough trust to let Betty take her in and get vet care for her. Precious remained protective of her and yowled when Betty tried to take the female to the Vet without his accompanying them.
I am a dog person basically but Precious was one of the great cats I have met.
Who was it who said "Dogs have owners. Cats have staff?"
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Well, I find this one "hard to swallow", too, although I believe you. Tomcats are not carers in any sense of the word, except when a tab happens to be in season, and then it's mutually-agreed rape. Red, my red-point Siamese tom, hated kittens with a passion that bordered on the murderous. But he knew I wouldn't tolerate him knocking them about and he was a fairly easy-going cat in most respects, so we came to an arrangement whereby he didn't beat up on the kittens and I didn't beat up on him. I have a treasured photo of him lying on the couch in the lounge, with a bunch of six or seven-week old kittens mobbing him. The look in his eyes in the photo says it all: "Gemme outta here!" 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>>>Rationalise it how you will, if you have lived with animals (and I suppose we all have), you see a mixture of things instinctive
That is so true. Our dog Max is a herder breed, however, he was born to a non-herding mom in the city, and never exposed to cattle in any way. BUT, I cannot take a walk with my Hubby if he decides to take the dog along because the dog will herd us incessantly.
If I fall behind one foot, he'll push me along with his head. If I walk a little ahead, he'll step in front of me to slow me down. If I get more than seven inches away from Hubby, he'll sidle up beside me and walk in an angle while pussing me with his shoulder so I am touching my husband. It's annoying I tell you.
He goes around us in circles, checks out the front, the sides, then the rear...checking for what, I don't know, but he does it.
Mind you, I wouldn't mind so much if I wasn't the one that was being pushed all the time.
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